


Secrets

by Tattered_Dreams



Category: The Maze Runner (Movies), The Maze Runner Series - All Media Types, The Maze Runner Series - James Dashner
Genre: AU, Again, Closets, I'm Going to Hell, M/M, Making Out, Secrets, Seven Minutes In Heaven, Spin the Bottle, Truth or Dare, University AU, dares, except not, minho is a dick but the best kind, uh, ummm - Freeform, verrrry slight choking
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-20
Updated: 2018-02-20
Packaged: 2019-03-21 19:11:03
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,696
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13747440
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tattered_Dreams/pseuds/Tattered_Dreams
Summary: In which the kids of Maze University play Spin the Bottle at one of Minho's parties.





	Secrets

**Author's Note:**

> I'm going to hell. This is not my fault. Blame discord.  
> Based on three prompts:  
> -Spin the bottle  
> -Truth or dare  
> -Seven minutes in heaven  
> -High School AU (traded for uni)
> 
> This is COMPLETE. I am not writing more. Thanks!

It's a Pepsi bottle, ruddy green, still with the dregs of soda swaying in it’s laid down side, sliding up and down the barrel as it spins in the centre of the floor. Minho is on the track team at Maze University and he really put effort into it. It's been going for a while now, the revolutions only just beginning to slow.

The party - a typical Friday night college affair - is in full swing. They’re all at Minho’s house, the downstairs floor pounding with the dance music that’s being played through the surround sound and people everywhere. There’s a game of beer pong in the dining room, they’re doing keg stands in the kitchen Thomas is pretty sure someone has already fallen out of a window. A handful of them have ended up in this particular room, the sprawling living space where the furniture has been pushed against the walls, and they’re playing this particular game.

Thomas isn't sure how he's one of them.

He’s been best friends with Minho so long that by now he tends to block out exactly how he gets roped into these things.

Finally the bottle coasts to a stop, rocking gently against the polished floorboards.

It's pointing at Newt.

Newt moved to their sleepy town from England just two years ago when he got into Maze Uni. In that time, Thomas has found out he's really smart, has a deadpan sense of humour that can rival even Minho’s sarcasm, is rarely without his leather jacket and he has a limp from an accident he hasn’t told anyone about. He’s an art major, which is something Thomas hadn’t seen coming, but somehow fits him and the laid back, nuanced personality that started breaking through the shell he wore when he first moved.

Thomas has spoken to him a handful of times, hung out with him on campus or between classes if Minho drags him along, but he doesn't really know him. He likes him – a lot, actually – it’s just that the popular kids aren't really Thomas' scene. He likes the science labs or the computer tech rooms; he finds the buzzing energy and wild recklessness of Minho’s athletic team to be draining after too long and there’s a pressure to keep up when he’s around them.

Newt has an inch on Thomas, and a lanky frame that he's slowly unfolding from the floor. He showed up to the party late, and Thomas hasn’t seen him touch any alcohol but he always seems carelessly at ease in his own skin without it.

A juvenile 'Ooooooh' rises up from the group surrounding Thomas as Newt stands.

There's Teresa, Sonya and Brenda, Gally, Winston, Fry and Zart. They’ve all come together from corners of campus, studying different things. Teresa is a biology major, Sonya does dance and engineering side by side and Brenda takes mechanics. Gally is deep into carpentry, Zart favours agriculture and Fry takes culinary arts. Winston’s boyfriend, Jeff, was a medical studies major, which had helped him realise he wanted to study veterinary science.

Minho, as always, is the ringleader. Thomas isn’t sure there’s a form of athletics he _can’t_ do. Its okay, though, they balance. Thomas can keep up with him when it comes to running at least if not the rest, but academically, Thomas is in the lead. His mom wanted to get his IQ actually tested and Minho calls him an idiot genius so often that Newt didn’t actually know his name for a week after he enrolled. He can be pretty bad with the social stuff, but academics always came easy.

Thomas just can't work out how he's here.

Well – he knows how. Minho. And the fact he lives next door. But that’s not the point. He can’t work out how he’s _here_ – participating.

"So, Newt. Truth or dare?"

Newt looks down at Minho’s bright, conniving face and shrugs. His expression is mild, tricky to read but mostly just unfazed.

"A dare then you Slinthead,” he says. A smile just tugs at the corner of his mouth and his tone is the kind of openly insulting one you only get between good friends who constantly call each other names. “I'm not getting out of here ‘til I do, am I?

"Wonderful choice," Minho says, delighted and wicked. He’s smarter than many give him credit for, probably because he’s also got purposely ignoring social cues down to an art form.

"Yeah, yeah," Newt somehow rolls his eyes with his entire body, entertained exasperation in the lilt of his head, the smile playing at his mouth, "we're all bloody inspired. What's it going to be?"

Minho pretends - badly, as far as Thomas is concerned - to look as though he's trying to think for a second. His face breaks into something even more cunning a second later as he points across the room to - oh, yes. Predictable.

The door to the cloak room.

Thomas wants to deck him.

Minho can be a right little shit and Newt shouldn't have to deal with it the same way Thomas does. Newt didn't grow up next door to the track star. He knows that's harsh, though. He and Minho were given opportunity. Their different personalities aside, they liked many similar things and they’ve been constants for each other, all through the perils of family drama and high school.

Newt doesn't appear at all concerned about the implication though.

He gives the closet door a frank look, brows a straight line under the messy array of his hair and then turns back to Minho, decidedly unimpressed. "Let me guess. Seven minutes in shucking heaven?"

"Nooooo," Minho says, instantly, dragging out the word, sounding wildly insulted and that's how Thomas knows it absolutely was going to be. Minho’s expression turns smug. "You have to go in there and tell someone a secret. Something you've not told anyone."

"Like where I'm going to bury your body?" Thomas mutters to the floor.

The words rip out of him, before he even thinks to hold them back. This is why he’s here; to remind Minho when he’s getting too much for normal, sane people, and at least attempt to rein him in. He’s also the one who was shoved onto the front step to face the police that one time Minho arranged for a bouncy Castle party in their last year of high school. He’s lucky that his parents thought it was hilarious, but his younger adopted brother, Chuck, has never let it go that he didn’t get to be there.

That’s not the point either right now.

Everyone seems to go quiet and Thomas lifts his head slowly to see that clearly everyone heard. Brenda is sniggering into her beer cup and Gally looks like he’s fighting hard to keep a straight face. Sonya’s eyes are wide and Fry is staring at the floor, fist over his mouth.

Whoops.

Minho and Newt are both looking at him. Thomas swallows, clears his throat, rolls his tongue. "Sorry, continue," he says glibly.

Minho’s eyes are narrowed, face pulled into good-hearted, shooting glare but Newt looks...amused, considering.

There's something warm and glowing about his expression and Thomas bites on his tongue, heart pulsing. He's a touch lost at what's happening here - isn't he always, as Minho would tease - but he can't help responding to it.

He realised he was bi years ago. Admitting it aloud, to his parents, to Minho...that took longer. But he's been comfortable with it for a long time now. And he tries to reel in his brain because there's no way he's reading this right at all and he's fantasized quite enough about Newt based just on their passing interactions on Maze Campus. He does not need to be adding to that; does not need for the rows of lockers, classroom desks and boys showers stored in his imagination to be traded for dark, confined spaces with pounding music resonating in his head. Bad idea.

But while Thomas is trapped in his mind, trying wildly not to go off the rails even as he feels his heart speed up, Minho has turned to the rest of the bottle party.

"Another spin to decide who hears the secret!" he cheers.

He holds the bottle aloft and -- Newt snatches it out of his hand.

Heads snap up to them, including Thomas' own. Minho looks nothing short of gleeful, like this has just confirmed something for him.

Thomas makes a mental note to trip him into the rose bed outside the kitchen window tomorrow, somehow.

But Newt takes no notice. He calmly tosses the bottle away, not even looking to see where it lands.

As it happens, Harriet is just arriving after a gymnastics meet ran late and she catches it clean out of the air as she passes through the doorway. Sonya waves hasty goodbyes to them as she uncoils from the floor and then she’s hurrying away to leap into her girlfriend's arms. The girls both head off, into the house, probably to find Aris.

Thomas focuses back on the circle. Minho blinks innocently up at Newt, who quirks an eyebrow at him.

"If I'm spilling dark secrets-"

"No one said it has to be dark-"

Newt levels him with a look and Minho’s mouth snaps shut. He has to tell Thomas how he does that. That would be a perfectly viable secret, as far as Thomas is concerned. Minho doesn’t seem to shut up unless he’s asleep, and even then sometimes he’s still going. Thomas is never sharing a tent at summer camp with him ever again.

"It's my secret," Newt says with a distinct air of humouring everyone. "I'll choose who I tell."

A shit-eating grin still on his face, Minho gestures at the ring of their classmates. Thomas shakes his head. Maybe not the rose bed. Maybe being locked out on his own patio is more proportionate retribution.

Newt steps around the circle...and stops right at Thomas' shoulder. All plans to screw up Minho’s Saturday come to a screeching halt as he registers Newt’s fingers settle on him. They’re technically on his back, a gesture that the others don’t seem to think is worth any note, but Thomas is acutely aware of the thumb pressing into the nape of his neck. His pulse jumps and his nerves twitch.

"Come on, Tommy," Newt says, his voice edged with a teasing and playfulness that wasn't there for Minho. "Want to hear a secret?"

Well he’s not going to say no.

 

The closet is, as Thomas was already aware, dark and confined. He was twelve when he hid in it during a game of hide and seek. The ceiling bulb hasn’t worked in years, so there’s just a very slim arrow-slot window with a clouded pane that lets in a hazy, weak orange glow from the patio lights outside.

The only real things going for it are the fact that it has a very cool poster of Minho’s favourite band on the wall opposite the coat hooks, and, right now, that Newt is in it with him.

"Not big on parties are you?" Newt asks him.

His voice is soft, relaxed, warm even as the door clicks shut behind them. It works against the spike of coiling tension in Thomas' stomach, soothes him until he can think again.

"No," he says. "But someone has to make sure Minho doesn't sell his identity on eBay or order a pizza to the Seattle space needle again."

Minho has done some dumb shit when drunk, and when he hosts these parties, he often gets drunk. He thinks he’ll spare Newt the story about the ten boxes of glow sticks and the donkey.

Newt, looking wildly entertained, chuckles at his reply. "Why the space needle?"

Thomas replies flatly, with the exact words Minho had fed him at the time. "Martians need sustenance, too."

Newt bursts into laughter and it feels like the best thing that's happened all week.

"He's my best friend," Thomas says honestly. "I put up with a lot of stuff for him because he does the same for me."

"Are you putting up with being here right now for Minho?" Newt asks. There's a note of intrigue in his tone; like he really wants the answer, but he also sounds teasing, reckless, in a way that implies he knows what the answer is.

Thomas gives it anyway. "No."

"So why?"

Thomas doesn't want to tell Newt it's because he's hopeless and just providing his brain with more ammunition to use against him. He goes with an easier reply that's just as true. "Got me out of that circle. And…you asked. Minho can be a dick. No one should tell someone something that they don't want to. You don't even have to tell me anything."

"I don't?"

Newt tilts his head, considering, evaluating. Thomas feels like he's being stripped under the weight of it.

"I have experience lying to Minho," he says, amused. "He'd never know you didn't spill."

"And if I want to?"

Newt's voice has dropped suddenly. There's something like promise to it, edged with darkness and energy. Thomas swallows hard.

"Is it illegal?"

"No."

Newt is stepping closer. Thomas can't move - rooted to the floor.

"Will it get me in trouble?"

Newt smirks. "It might."

He was sure, at first he was reading into the whole thing the wrong way, and then he wasn’t so certain. Now he really hopes he’s not because his brain is already reeling away from him.

“I grew up with Minho,” he says, and his voice comes out raw, a shadow in the dark. “I’m used to trouble by now.”

“Do me a favour,” Newt says, a murmur. “Don’t say his name anymore.”

Fuck.

Thomas almost swallows his tongue.

He’s definitely not reading this wrong. He definitely won’t be locking Minho out tomorrow – he’ll actually buy him a hangover taco. And he promises that’s the last time he’s even going to think Minho’s name.

“Done,” he says.

Newt sinks in close to him, fingers reaching out, pressing, splayed into his sternum where muscle meets bone and Thomas has stopped breathing before his back even crushes into the wall.

He had figured Newt was into guys in general, just never thought he would be one of them. And he’s guessing a little, because he’s seen Newt quiet and…well, docile, when they’ve hung out – or when he’s just watched him - but he’s somehow fairly certain he won’t be steering this for much longer.

Newt has a kinetic kind of energy to him, and it’s like being tugged into a slipstream or watching planets align around a sun. For all the times Thomas has seen him just go with the flow, he’s seen him be the one to act first, too. And he started this. He started it when he looked at Thomas, considering him, across that circle and then made the choice to touch him in front of their friends.

So Thomas has to make the most of it right now.

He knocks Newt’s hand aside and has a second to appreciate the kindling of pleased surprise in his eyes.

“You still haven’t told me any secrets,” Thomas says. He lets his back shift and settle comfortably on the wall, slouching a little so his legs can brace him in place.

Newt’s expression sparks and a wild kind of gravity makes the room feel thick.

“Secrets are earned,” he says.

Thomas has to bite down on his tongue. He steadies himself, which is insane because steady is the last thing he feels. He feels like he’s standing on a cliff edge, like the house is burning down, like he’s been tied into a knot. But he nods, lets his head drop back on the wall. “I’m good with that.”

He makes up his mind, decides if this is what he gets, he’s going to make it a damn good memory, and he tugs at the open edge of Newt’s leather jacket. Newt’s weight drops against him, only because he allowed it, Thomas is well aware.

“Done this before, Tommy?” Newt murmurs, breath ghosting across Thomas’ throat. A thumb brushes at his adam’s apple and automatically he swallows under it.

“Gone above PG thirteen in Minho’s coat closet? No,” Thomas rasps back.

Newt chuckles, the vibration shocking and igniting where his body presses.

“Good to know,” he says, amused. “How about anywhere else?”

“I’m a twenty one year old Bisexual college student,” Thomas tells him, both frankly and breathlessly. “I’ve done this before. In a bunch of places that aren’t this house.”

“Now I’m curious,” Newt says. There’s a strain in his voice that wasn’t there a second ago, and Thomas watches his eyes dilate in the dark. “And also—“

Newt’s thumb slides down, fingers curling at the side of Thomas’ neck and then he’s squeezing. The faint constricting sensation sends him spiralling; Thomas feels his heart crash in his chest, then pulse, vivid, electric and far too fast. His blood runs hot in his veins and he gasps out.

Newt hums. “Told you not to say his name anymore.”

And then Newt’s kissing him, pressing in, using his weight to pin Thomas into the wall.

He’s purposeful about it, doesn’t bother to be gentle or coaxing. Thomas doesn’t care; doesn’t need it. He throws himself into it, traces his tongue over the roof of Newt’s mouth, testing reactions and pursuing them. Newt only allows it in doses.

The tiny room shrinks in. Thomas can feel his heart pumping a staccato rhythm in his chest, in his ears, in the hollow of his throat when Newt’s mouth closes over the skin there. Fingers press into him, skittering, testing, teasing. Thomas grips the collar of Newt’s jacket, fingers tight around the buckle and tugs in, lifting Newt back to him. It’s actually been a while, and the last was a girl, but all of that becomes a foggy concept against Newt. He wanted this more than he let himself realise.

Thomas isn’t keeping track of time - or much of anything really. He doesn’t even keep track of where he’s touching or kissing. There’s fingers on his skin, a mouth over his, yearning in his bloodstream. He’s focused only on pulling the same reactions out in Newt, listening for the sounds he makes and swallowing them.

The knock on the door cracks like a gunshot.

It splits through the thick air and Newt’s forehead drops onto the wall next to him. Their harsh breathing fills the tight space, each one of Newt’s exhales sending a rush of warm, welcome energy into Thomas’ stomach. It’s not helping. Not even a little.

“How long does a secret take to tell, Shank?”

Minho.

Shit.

Thomas tugs in deep breaths as the world slowly comes back. His heart is out of control, his body strung tight like a bow and he’s still got his fingers curled around the buckle strap at the collar of Newt’s jacket. Slowly, he lets go.

Newt lifts his head, expression burning but amused now and he looks over at the door.

“As long as I bloody want,” he shouts through it.

There’s a pause, the world full of static and the distant, clouded beat of Minho’s surround sound dance music. Then there’s a huff of laughter, barely audible through the wood.

“Continue, then,” Minho says. “But know that my poster is very sensitive to…secrets.”

He’s such a dick. Thomas is definitely going to lock him out.

But Newt turns back to him, eyes sliding over the poster on its piece of wall and his head tilts.

“From what Brenda’s told me, his poster could probably learn a thing or two.”

“Oh my God,” Thomas chokes, sudden hilarity warring with the left over current of wanting in his bloodstream. “Don’t even-“

Newt smirks, laughs and then slides his fingers around the back of Thomas’ neck. He kisses him again, once, deliberate, his taste on the roof of Thomas’ mouth. The humour snuffs out like a candle in a thunderstorm.

Newt pulls back, holding close.

“Did I earn this secret?” Thomas breathes.

Newt’s voice is low, a rich whisper. “The day Minho first introduced me to you was in the empty art classroom, not long after semester started.”

Thomas remembers.

It had been a bright, sunny lunchtime, and Minho had tugged him across Maze campus to the art block, saying he’d met a new student who didn’t really know anyone and Thomas had to meet him, too. Mostly Minho and Newt had talked; Minho’s energy was usually enough all on its own. Thomas had laid himself down on the floor and contented himself with listening as he puzzled out his first assignment in his head.

Right now, he’s not understanding how that’s a secret.

“I remember,” he says anyway.

When Newt speaks, it’s with blunt, clear intent. “I don’t remember a thing Minho said to me that day. I watched you lay down in the middle of the art studio and I didn’t think about much else for three weeks.”

Thomas exhales. His head hits the wall again, that placid, summer gold memory in his head suddenly twisting into something …else. More. Wanting rocks down his spine, a flash fire reaction.

“Fuck,” he swears darkly.

“If you’ll let me,” Newt says, and Thomas’ world turns into lightning, shrapnel and colours that don’t exist.

He’s not sure how to reply to that, so he reaches out, grabs the buckle on Newt’s collar again – he knew he liked this jacket – and tugs him forward. Newt kisses him fiercely, and then quiets, smiles against his mouth. Thomas releases him.

Newt considers him for a moment, then nods, reaches for the door handle.

“Meet me in the art room tomorrow,” he says.

Thomas’ heart skitters. Whoa. Okay. This is…yeah. Happening.

“Its Saturday tomorrow,” he manages to remember. “Campus is closed.”

Newt’s smirk is wicked and promising, highlighted now as he tugs open the door and the hallway light spills across the floor. It really is such a small closet.

“Exactly,” Newt says, and Thomas realises, belatedly as usual, that that was the point.

**Author's Note:**

> (A mild thing: I totally buy that Minho knows damn well Newt doesn't even remember a thing he said that day).


End file.
